Dr. Phil Horner: Why I'm Optimistic About Glaucoma Research

Philip Horner, PhD — Excerpt from the 2010 Catalyst For a Cure Science Presentation in San Francisco

Video Transcript

Phil Horner: I wanted to start by saying a broad statement, and that is that I think this is a period of tremendous hope for glaucoma research.

For many years, for the last 50 years, the disease has really been misunderstood, I think. We’ve been targeting very specific pathways that at the time made sense, but in the light of data over the last 10 years or less, we now know that glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disease, and it’s a multifactorial disease.

A lot of that research that’s been done has been important, but the new information that we have tells us all the players, and I would say we’ve come to a period that’s sort of like we’ve been working on a puzzle in the dark for a long time.

If you can imagine working on a puzzle in the dark, you can’t see any of the visual cues, it’s much more complicated, and you don’t even know how many of the pieces are there.

And I really think in the last few years, we’ve turned the light on glaucoma, and we’ve turned the light on putting all the puzzle pieces out, and now it’s a matter of putting them together.